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THE deadly toll on Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets from Gaza threatens to drag Jerusalem into its second unwanted war in less than a year. Palestinian terrorists bear the brunt of the blame – but Israeli brass and bureaucratic bean-counters bear some, too.

Israel has been gambling with the security of its own people, particularly since it pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza in September 2005.

Thanks to the Palestinians’ internecine battles, President Mahmoud Abbas is impotent – he can’t rein in the rocket attacks on Israel even if he wants to. But the Israeli government could have prevented many of the conditions that have forced a reinvasion of Gaza to the top of the national agenda.

All it would have taken is money. That is, a reordering of spending priorities to include defense as well as offense. But the generals and bureaucrats managing Israel’s defense budget prefer things that go bang. Sure, they’ll support funding for defensive systems and technologies – to protect Israeli troops. But when it comes to protecting civilians from the threat of Palestinian Qassem rockets or Hezbollah Katyusha rockets, there’s never enough cash.

As far back as May 2004, according to Israel’s comptroller general, military planners realized that the Gaza withdrawal would put 83 communities within range of Palestinian rockets and mortars. Initial plans called for renovating shelters, hardening roofs of public and private structures, and other so-called passive defensive measures at a cost of $1 billion. But as Judge Micha Lindenstrauss noted in a January 2006 report, the Defense Minstry never approved that plan.

Fast-forward three years. Not even a fraction of those 83 at-risk communities have acquired even minimal protection. And that includes Sderot – the town pummeled by nearly 200 rockets in the last 10 days.

Similar disinterest prevented deployment of a system capable of intercepting short-range rockets. Even though last summer’s Lebanon war clearly proved the strategic value of such threats, many generals and defense bureaucrats still consider them mere nuisances unworthy of the hundreds of millions in development funding. So, despite nearly five years of study and piecemeal development (much of it paid for by Uncle Sam), Israel is still years away from fielding anything real.

Which leaves the nation in a pinch. The rocket attacks have denied normal life for tens of thousands of Israelis living within an 8-kilometer radius from the Gaza border.

Israel’s security Cabinet recently authorized the military to venture 1,000 meters into Gaza and widened the list of targets OK’d for aerial assassination strikes. At least two divisions of troops have been primed for full-scale invasion, should Jerusalem grant the green light to trounce the terrorists and destroy their arsenals of increasingly sophisticated rockets, mortars and anti-tank missiles.

But with Israel still recuperating from its botched Lebanon War, few political and military leaders view a full-scale invasion of Gaza as anything other than a lose-lose proposition.

A seven- or 10-day operation, like the one last November, would clean things up temporarily – but the chaos and violence would resume shortly after Israeli forces returned to their side of the border.

Most here realize that only a persistent, long-term Israeli presence over wide areas of the strip stands a chance of preventing the rocket salvos. But such a presence would require Israel to reestablish its military rule over 1.1 million hostile Palestinians. And Israel paid a stiff price in its own domestic unity to get out of Gaza. It’s going to take some spectacular terror “success” – say, a direct hit on a school, with dozens of dead and maimed children – to get most here to agree to get sucked back into that hellhole.

Now, more than ever, Israel’s political leaders need to change the way they calculate the costs and benefits of military force. They can’t allow old thinking by the managers of the nation’s defense budget to narrow their options.

The brass and the bean-counters must start figuring in the added value of civilian defense. They’ll argue that wars are never won or lost with missiles. That’s true enough – but proper defenses just might be able to prevent war from erupting in the first place.

Barbara Opall-Rome is senior correspondent in Israel for Defense News.